Do You Have An Award Winning Marketing Stack?

Enter to win a "Stackie" Award by March 11th. Winners to be named at the MarTech Conference in San Francisco March 21–22, 2016.

Later this month, at the MarTech Conference, program chair Scott Brinker (@ChiefMartec) will be presenting the second annual “Stackie Awards” in an effort to advance the practice of marketing technology management.

Don’t delay in crafting your submission. Entries are due before midnight Friday, March 11 (Pacific time).

Why Enter?

Winners will be celebrated onstage at MarTech in San Francisco, March 21–22. (You don’t have to be present to win, but it would be fun.)

The conference will donate $5,000 to charity. Each of the top five winners will have the opportunity to nominate a charity of their preference to receive a $1,000 donation.

There will even be groovy trophy statues (much cooler than Golden Globes).

Seriously, though, while the recognition, trophy and charitable donation in your name are intended to make this a fun little contest, the real point of the Stackies is to share your ideas with the marketing technology community and to learn from others.

Marketing technology stacks — the collection of marketing technology products your company uses and how they’re conceptually organized — are an important part of modern marketing management.

We can learn a lot by seeing how our peers conceive of their stacks and the pieces that they assemble together. — Scott Brinker

All entries into the Stackies will be publicly shared in a SlideShare deck at the end of the contest — So everyone in the community benefits from the effort invested in these, and everyone who enters gets recognized for their contribution.

How To Enter: Rules & Guidelines

So what do you need to do to enter the Stackies? These four steps (follow carefully):

Create a single 16×9 slide that visually organizes your marketing technology stack however you think best represents the way you think of it.

Send an email to sbrinker@chiefmartec.com with the subject line, “Stackies entry,” with your slide attached as an image, a PDF or a PPTX file any time before midnight Friday, March 11 (Pacific time).

Include in your email the sentence, “I give you permission to publicly share my entry in the Stackies.”

Optionally, include in your email a paragraph or two that describes the rationale behind the way you’ve organized your stack and any guiding principles that you feel are important in its architecture.

The judging committee will select the five best entries as the winners. Entries will be judged on the following five criteria, in this order of importance:

Alignment: How well-aligned is your stack with your business?

Concept: How effective is the conceptual organization of your stack?

Clarity: How easy is it for a reader to understand your stack?

Design: The aesthetics of your slide and its visual appeal.

Detail: More detail is generally better, within reason, for a single slide.

A note about “detail.” We prefer that entries in the Stackies include the specific products that are being used. This isn’t for endorsing any particular vendor, but to help us collectively see examples of where specific products fit out in the wild.

However, this is not a requirement. If you don’t wish to disclose a particular vendor, simply put a generic placeholder label for that product in your stack (e.g., “Data Management Platform”). A Stackie entry that has anonymous product placeholders can still win. But if you are willing to name names, we’d greatly appreciate it, as it does make these stack visualizations considerably more tangible.

See an example of what a Stackie entry might look like and read more details about the process from Scott Brinker over at the Chief Martech blog.